Fragamemnon
Member
Since our last pro Starcraft thread was back from November and keeps getting bumped totally out of context for current matches, I volunteered to set up a new thread we could bump all year for current professional and semiprofessional Starcraft.
Now wait, you're saying, what's this-professional Starcraft? Yes, that's right, in South Korea Starcraft is very much a full blown sport in every imaginative way:
- big salaries for the best players,
- high drama between both professional teams and players
- televised coverage of games with color commentary on two television networks
- An official , overbearing and player-unfriendly regulating body
- crowded venues to watch important games, empty arenas when the weaker/less popular teams play
- grueling practice schedules
- amateur, major and minor league play
and most importantly
- Lots of ill tempered and bad mannered fans on the Internet.
See? Everything you'd expect in a sport!
Would you like to know more?
All these acronyms and terms for this stuff are confusing-I'm not much of an RTS fan and I'm bewildered by everything that is going on!
Learning the rules only comes with time and exposure to watching the game. Thankfully, there is a very vibrant set of English-speaking commentators who cover the matches and take the time to explain the things that are going on. I'm going to link two in particular, since they are covering the current set of Starleagues (the individual, not team tournaments):
http://www.youtube.com/user/RanshinDA (NATE MSL, you can start with the round of 32 and go from there)
http://www.youtube.com/user/nukethestars (EVER OSL, again start back and watch some games with good English commentary)
The recent games are good because you get to watch the current players play with the current strategies on the current maps. You can watch older leagues and matches but it's not 100% representative of the current state of the game due to metagame shifts (when new innovations and new maps significantly change the way the game plays) and older players not playing as much as the new stars.
Now, while you are watching, you're going to want to look up the following:
*) Glossary like lookups-things like what units do, what buildings do, what terms mean, what is the difference between two hatch and three hatch, what is a timing push,etc. For this, I would recommend the Liquipedia, a wiki set up by Team Liquid contributors (TL is the biggest non-Korean, aka "foreign" SC site) . You can generally search and find the answers to all sorts of questions you'd have, then unpause the youtube.
*) What kind of record a player has. For this, use the Team Liquid Progamer Database. You can search, and note that players who have won leagues or have high win percentages, high ELO (a comparative scale used to rank players) or KeSPA ranking are the current powerhouses.
The TLPD has all sorts of other great info as well.
Would you like to know more?
OK, this is really pretty neat. I never dreamed I could expand my nerdiness this far. I like having the English commentaries, but I really , really want to watch the games live so that I can root for my player/team as it happens. How can I do that?
Good news is that the marvel of the internet allows us to get streaming feeds of live televised matches worldwide and not just Korea. The bad news? If you're in the US, usually the matches are anywhere from 11PM EST to 4:30 AM EST. But on the weekend I like to stay up anyway.
Here is the current calendar of games for January. It has times in KST (Korea), EST, PST, and GMT. When one of these games is airing, in the upper right hand corner of TeamLiquid's site there will be links to the streams and you can join there. You can also go into the forums for the Live Report where they keep a summary of the match in progress and they have stream links there as well.
Note that the streams are in Korean, but after a while you won't mind at all. The commentators really get into the game and it's pretty easy to follow once you've watched for a few months. If you have any questions of course, that's what this thread is for.
I will bump this thread when interesting matches come up when I am around watching games and the most recent bump will have links to streams and information. Others, feel free to contribute as well.
Here are two more links for you, especially if you're "new" to the game:
http://www.teamliquid.net/video/userstream.php?user=Day[9] - This is a former pro-am US player who now does, in his spare time, match analysis and discussion of both current and past games. He has an engaging style and you'll probably get a lot of his commentary, whether you are new or veteran to the game.
http://www.gomtv.net/videos/
- The GOM TV series has English commentary. I would suggest the Star Invitationals, which while somewhat old, feature a lot of still star players and some great matches (Stork vs. Flash, Bisu vs. Flash, etc.)
